Tuesday, October 28, 2008

National Media Stealing Our Theme

In an article at Slate.com, an Ohio native discusses a piece of local political baking: the Busken presidential cookie poll.

Busken is a family-run bakery in Cincinnati, and every election since 1984, it has sold iced cookies bearing images of the presidential candidates' faces. As of today, Obama is outselling McCain at Busken's 19 stores by a cookie margin of more than 2-to-1.

I was more interested in a later paragraph though.

Good news for Busken's bottom line is bad news for the McCain campaign. No Republican has ever won the presidency without taking Ohio. Further, the Buckeye State isn't just a swing state. It's a bellwether. And for good reason: Ohio is a microcosm of the nation. According to the Census Bureau, Ohioans graduate from high school, go to college, have children, shop, and buy homes in numbers almost mirroring national averages. Our median income is $43,371; the national median is $44,334. Our population breakdown is slightly whiter than the United States as a whole, but we have just as many women-owned and black-owned business as elsewhere. Even our commute is almost identical to the national average. (And we're probably all listening to the same bad music or talk radio for those 23 minutes in the car.) The state is utterly Midwestern, but it borders—and is influenced by—the Northeast (New York and Pennsylvania) and the South (West Virginia and Kentucky).

Sounds very familiar. In fact, it is very strange that the article comes out shortly after we started the blog. Either way, Dave and I need to start cashing in on our ideas at major online publications.